The Allure of Disgust: Rural Decadence in Zola`s La Terre

 The Allure of Disgust: Rural Decadence in Zola’s La Terre
Riikka ROSSI
University of Helsinki
RÉSUMÉ
Le roman La Terre, qualifié de “recueil de scatologie,” même par les disciples de Zola,
devient emblématique du naturalisme comme littérature ordurière dont les sujets putrides
éveillent la curiosité des lecteurs. En dépit de l’indignation que suscite ce roman, ce n’est pas
tout le monde qui est mécontent de l’effet de choc provoqué par une telle épopée rurale.
Joris‐Karl Huysmans en particulier, loue la brutalité des personnages de La Terre et la
beauté mélancolique de ses paysages champêtres. De fait, la fascination dont témoigne
Huysmans pour cette œuvre atteste du courant décadent qui imprègne l’enquête zolienne sur
le monde rural.
Dans cette perspective, l’objectif de notre étude est d’offrir une réflexion sur
l’affinité générique de La Terre avec la littérature fin‐de‐siècle. Cet article se concentre sur
les figures antinomiques de Buteau et de Jean Macquart en particulier, afin de montrer
l’ambiguité du roman, qui se caractérise simultanément par la tentation décadente du dégoût
et la spiritualité rédemptrice de moments sublimes. On se propose également de réfléchir sur
l’horizon émotionnel de ce récit: la transgression des tabous humains y suscite en effet des
sentiments négatifs, comme la colère et la répulsion, qui renforcent l’effet de réel de
l’écriture zolienne en démasquant les inégalités sociales dans le milieu rural, et en créant un
climat de passion et de suspense.
Samedi soir [vers le 15 novembre 1887]
Mon cher Zola,
Je viens de terminer La Terre que j’ai lue, à petits coups, savoureusement. L’impression qui
se dégage pour moi avant tout, de cette première lecture, est celle d’une incontestable
grandeur. Votre cadre de paysages est superbe; avec vous l’on voit une mélancolique
Beauce, s’étendre, plate, à l’infini, d’un bout à l’autre du livre. L’on y est, pas dans une autre
campagne, c’est vraiment fort; je trouve que la mer du blé où le petit clocher disparaît à la
fin, est une des plus fermes pages que vous avez écrites. Quant à vos paysans ils sont tout
bonnement terribles. La lente extermination du vieux Fouan par ses enfants est suivie, pas à
pas et arrive, à la fin, avec les Buteau, à un bon effet d’horreur.
Joris-Karl Huysmans to Zola in 18871
The famous critical reactions provoked by the publication of Zola’s La Terre (1887) resonate
amongst the notes and echoes of attraction and repulsion which fill the historical soundbox of
Zolian naturalism and the scandals it generates. La Terre, characterized as “un recueil de
2
scatologie” even by Zola’s disciples in Le Manifeste des cinq became emblematic of
1
Lettre LV (vers le 15 novembre 1887) in Lettres inédites à Émile Zola. J.-K. Huysmans, ed. Pierre Lambert,
Introduction by Pierre Cogny (Geneva: Droz, 1953) 135.
2
As an article, “Le manifeste des cinq” was published in Le Figaro on 18 August 1887, signed by Alphonse
Daudet, Paul Bonnetain, Lucien Descaves, Paul Margueritte and Gustave Guiches. In the open letter Zola’s
Excavatio, Vol. XXV, 2015
THE ALLURE OF DISGUST: RURAL DECADENCE IN ZOLA’S LA TERRE
naturalism as a troublesome kind of literature, yet one that stimulates the reading public’s
quiet curiosity. However, not everyone was unhappy with Zola’s epic of an agricultural
family and its gamut of shock effects. In his private letter to Zola, Joris-Karl Huysmans
acclaimed the brutality of Zola’s protagonists, and praised the melancholic beauty of the
Beauce landscape. The fin-de-siècle idol had recently finished En Rade (1887), Huysmans’
mixture of provincial realism and decadent fantasy, and was excited about Zola’s
contribution to rural decadence.3
Huysmans’ fascination with La Terre is indicative of the decadent allure of disgust
which permeates the Zolian survey of the rural worlds and it also stimulates the pursuit of
this essay, a reflection of the decadent aspects in La Terre. Previous research on Zola’s novel
– David Baguley’s readings in particular – have illuminated the multi-generic nature of La
Terre, including its grotesque and parodic elements which mock the bucolic tradition.4 In this
article, I continue the discussion on Zola’s hybrid novel and move on to explore La Terre’s
generic affiliation with decadent literature. The connection between naturalism and
decadence has been long acknowledged, as Jean de Palacio reminds us: “Que le Naturalisme
ait côtoyé la Décadence, est une évidence, depuis longtemps reconnue. La Curée, La Faute
de l’Abbé Mouret, Nana en portent témoignage.”5 Yet La Terre is not usually included
amongst Zola’s decadent works, and the rural decadence, in general, remains an
underresearched area of study: from Baudelaire to Huysmans, Bourget and Wilde, decadence
is generally associated with the urban or upper classes. However, while La Terre’s mode of
representation avoids symbolist fantasy and remains anchored in the realm of everyday
realities, the novel’s blending of the naturalist representation of rural life and decadent
corruption contributes to creating pre-texts for elaborated and mature forms of fin-de-siècle
decadence.
In my reading, I focus on the contrasting figures of Buteau and Jean Macquart in
particular, in order to unveil the changing facets of Zola’s ambiguous novel, from the allure
of disgust to decadence’s propensity for creating sublime moments. Buteau’s demonic,
Dionysian vitality, with its primitive energy, becomes a dynamo powering the novel’s
transgressions against nature. In contrast, Jean Macquart’s sensitivity and contemplation
reveal other affective atmospheres of the novel, that of melancholia and the sublime. La
Terre’s beatific views of rural landscapes unveil the redemptive potential of primordial
nature, even leading into oceanic experiences of immersion. The multi-generic nature of La
Terre – with its aspects of naturalism, decadence, grotesque, and the sublime – can itself be
considered as a symptom of decadent aesthetics of transgression, which does not respect any
conventional codes of representation: by regularly changing generic coloring, La Terre
becomes a text-chameleon which refuses a certain ease in reading and generates a storyworld which has no stable textual identity.
Moreover, while tracking La Terre’s mixture of naturalism and decadence, this essay
reflects on the ambivalent emotional horizon of naturalism’s shock effects and the allure of
disciples turned against the father of naturalism, accusing Zola of abandoning his ideals. As David Baguley has
noticed, the manifesto, ironically, repeats La Terre’s theme of the parricide. See David Baguley, Zola et les
genres (Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1993) 101. Yet as Anatole France observed, not everyone in Le
Manifeste des cinq was to cast the first stone for Zola, pointing to Paul Bonnetain in particular, the author of the
scandalous novel Charlot s’amuse (1883). See Anatole France, “La Vie littéraire. La Terre,” Le Temps 28 août
1887.
3
The term “décadence” appears also in Le Manifeste des cinq, but as a qualifier of Zola himself and his artistic
talent: Les cinq referred to “la décadence même, son talent” and to Zola’s “dégénérescence” as a naturalist
author. See Émile Zola, La Terre (Paris: Pocket, 1999) 527. Henceforth, further reference to this work will be to
this edition and page numbers only will appear in parentheses within the text.
4
See Baguley 94-101.
5
Jean de Palacio, La Décadence. Le mot et la chose (Paris: Les Belles lettres, 2011) 33–34.
RIIKKA ROSSI
disgust. La Terre’s violent struggle for the Earth Mother moves into the realm of negative
emotions and ugly feelings, such as anger and disgust, which enhance the novel’s effects of
reality and unmask acute inequalities in rural conditions, all the while thrilling and
entertaining the reader and creating a spirit of suspense.
Vitality and Degeneration
The conflicting reactions to La Terre illustrate the very ambiguity inscribed in Zola’s peasant
figures. In Les Rougon-Macquart Zola envisioned an architecture of modern society, quatre
mondes,” including “le peuple, les commerçants, la bourgeoisie et le grand monde,” plus “un
monde à part – putain, meurtrier, prêtre, artiste.”6 Yet the peasant world, as it is represented
in such works as La Terre or Fécondité (1899)7 does not entirely fall into these categories;
rather it creates its own class of outlaws, strongly controversial among Zola’s crowd fictions.8
In Zola’s novels, peasants are often negatively valorised: they are portrayed as the lowest
class in society, even inferior to workers, and serve to symbolize the evils of modernity, from
obsessive avarice to disrespect for nature. In Thérèse Raquin (1867), the coarse artistmurderer embodies the dangerous bestiality of rural origins and triggers effects of romantic
horror. Laurent, “un vrai fils de paysan,” manifests animal instincts, vulgarity and sanguine
brutality, all of which engender in him a distorted artistic creativity and instigate a passionate
desire for the cruel murder.9 In Les Rougon-Macquart, fêlure and degeneration emanate from
the peasant: the hereditary taint has its origins in the rural populace. In La Fortune des
Rougon (1871), tante Dide first marries Rougon, who is termed a “paysan mal dégrossi,” a
“pauvre diable, épais, lourd, commun, sachant à peine parler français”; she later enters into a
romance with a savage smuggler and poacher of the forests, Macquart.10 At the same time,
however, primitive nature generates transgressive vitality and life-forces, which transcend
fêlure and degeneration and renew the cycle of generations. In this view, Zolian protagonists
with provincial origins represent the life force, red-blooded sexual energy and success. For
instance, in Au Bonheur des Dames (1883), Octave Mouret, “un garçon tombé du Midi à
Paris” displays drive and desire which result in success both in public and private life, in
business and the bedroom.
La Terre’s rural decadence encapsulates the ambiguous poetics of vitality and
degeneration which are peculiar to Zola’s peasant world. Through Jean Macquart, the
narrator’s delegate and the witnessing eye for the novel’s increasing disorder, La Terre
guides its reader into a Heart of Darkness in the French countryside. Instead of noble savages
living in harmony with nature, the novel presents a gallery of grimly charismatic heroes,
abject, yet capable of brutal actions. Incest, rapes, parricide – the series of transgressive
immoralities in the village community drive the novel towards a decadent adoration of
6
See Henri Mitterand, Zola et le naturalisme (Paris: PUF, 1986) 39.
In Fécondité, the praise for agricultural society does not include the native peasants. In this novel, the rural
heroes are newcomers from Paris, while the local farmers are described as rabble, who have let their farms go to
wrack and ruin.
8
On Zola’s crowd fictions, see Naomi Schor, Zola’s Crowds (Baltimore and London: The John Hopkins University
Press, 1978).
9
“Laurent était un vrai fils de paysan, d’allure un peu lourde, le dos bombé, les mouvements lents et précis, l’air
tranquille et entêté.” “Ses premiers essais étaient restés au-dessous de la médiocrité; son œil de paysan voyait
gauchement et salement la nature; ses toiles, boueuses, mal bâties, grimaçantes, défiaient toute critique.” In
Thérèse Raquin Laurent’s ease of planning and committing Camille’s murder is also explained in terms of his
peasant origines: “Il risquait moins en tuant le mari: il ne soulevait aucun scandale, il poussait seulement un
homme pour se mettre à sa place. Dans sa logique brutale de paysan, il trouvait ce moyen excellent et naturel.”
See Émile Zola, Thérèse Raquin (Paris: Fasquelle, 1977) 45, 47, and 83.
10
Émile Zola, La Fortune des Rougon (Paris: Pocket, 1999) 65.
7
THE ALLURE OF DISGUST: RURAL DECADENCE IN ZOLA’S LA TERRE
perversity.11 The negation of innate, natural laws of family affection which manifests itself in
Buteau’s action suggests a turning away from nature. The novel, as a whole, is characterized
by an ambiguous narrative drive which combines moral indignation through Jean’s
perspective, with the narrator’s voyeuristic fascination for reporting the increasing
corruption. According to Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau, the move from naturalism to decadence is
often revealed by the implied author’s attitude towards the fictional world: “Le naturaliste
devient décadent à partir du moment où il reconnaît dans la décadence non seulement une loi
mais une tentation, où il aime.”12 A naturalist author becomes decadent the moment he turns
into a necrophile, one who, instead of seriously examining his social defects, views
degeneration as an ideal, and is excited by the allure of disgust.13
However, while La Terre manifests some of the decadent allure of degeneration and
corruption, the novel avoids the kind of movement fantasy and internalisation which is
peculiar to decadent literature.14 The novel’s fictional world is located in the familiar realm of
everyday realities, thereby incorporating such characteristics of the naturalist novel as the
serious study of social defects and the hardships of rural living. By featuring the old Fouan as
a victim of his children’s greed, the novel unveils a tragic vision, which has been seen as a
component of naturalism which distinguishes it from decadence.15 The tragic aspects are
enhanced by the novel’s indebtedness to Shakespearean tragedy: Old Fouan’s destiny is
reminiscent of that of King Lear.16 Fouan’s decision to divide up his land, like Lear’s
decision to relinquish power, proves to be a fatal mistake – a tragic error – which ends in
death and destruction.17 The cruel competition for inheritance results in the ruin of the family
and, finally, in parricide. Like Shakespeare in King Lear, Zola examines the anxieties of
ageing which lead into powerlessness and decline and, in the fin-de-siècle spirit, envisions a
decadent view of the human lifecycle as one of constant degeneration. In spite of these tragic
aspects, the character narration in La Terre remains ambivalent, creating positive and
negative valorisations. Old Fouan does not appear simply as an innocent victim for whom the
reader is supposed to feel only compassion; he also inspires a simultaneous refusal of
empathy, along with feelings of disgust for an old tyrant who for decades had violently and
11
In his review of La Terre, Anatole France was horrified by the novel’s incestuous relationships: “Ce malheureux
village est plein d’inceste.” See France (1887). The motif of incest is indicative of the novel’s decadent features,
a symbol of transgressive immorality and perversity. As discussed by Richard Fabrizio, incest is a prevalent
motif in romantic authors from Rousseau to Chateaubriand, who represent sibling incest, both pseudo and real,
as pure, touching, invariably sympathetic. However, towards the end of the century only the decadents deal with
incest. See Richard Fabrizio, “Incest,” Dictionary of Literary Themes and Motifs, ed. Jean-Charles Seigneuret
(New York and London: Greenwood Press 1988) 649–65.
12
Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau, La Tentation du livre sur rien. Naturalisme et décadence (Mont-de Marsan, France:
Éditions universitaires, 1994) 417.
13
See Thorel-Cailleteau 417.
14
See Pirjo Lyytikäinen, “Decadence in the wilderness. Will to transgression or the strange bird of Finnish Decadence,”
Nordlit 28 (2011): 246.
15
Lyytikäinen 246.
16
See Baguley 97 and Sylvie Thorel-Cailleteau, “L’ombre du roi Lear: une lecture de La Terre de Zola,” Revue
de littérature comparée 44 (1990): 481-90.
17
The tragic vision of the naturalist novel has been delineated by David Baguley in Naturalist Fiction. The Entropic
Vision (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 97–119, but many previous studies have also discussed
the tragic aspects of naturalist fiction. In his landmark work on La Terre d’Émile Zola (1952), Guy Robert, for
instance, indicates the tragic elements in the figure of Fouan. Fouan’s tragic destiny is emphasized in André
Antoine’s silent film La Terre of 1921, which ends in Fouan’s natural death over the land. A tragic ethos is also
portrayed in L’Assommoir, which focuses on the rise and fall of Gervaise, who, despite her efforts, is trapped by
the misfortunes of hereditary degeneration and the uncontrollable forces of a tragedy which threaten the basis of
human order. The fame and aesthetic value of L’Assommoir, duly acknowledged by the authors of Le Manifeste
des cinq, was certainly connected to this tragic vision, which engaged readers’ sympathy towards and
compassion for the sufferings of an ordinary working-class woman.
RIIKKA ROSSI
brutally dominated his family, loving only his land, and who is now being punished for his
past actions.
La Terre’s blending of decadent vitality and degeneration is most discernible in
Buteau, the human beast of Beauce. Instead of passively submitting to his inner instincts,
Buteau is drawn to primitive nature to create vital forces of transgression against nature – à
rebours.18 Buteau is most illustrative of the decadent strain of the novel: he is the obstinate,
solitary, passionate hero, whose will and joy of transgression and violation of human taboos
evoke fin-de-siècle narcissistic protagonists from Huysmans to Wilde. Arrogant, but
charismatic and powerful, cunning and deceptive, Buteau shares numerous traits with sinister
and diabolic fin-de-siècle figures. Buteau embodies transgressive energy typical of Byronic
heroes, thus creating a version of the decadent and destructive fatal man.19 He is neither
satisfied with mundane realities nor with the distribution of estate, but like the decadent
Nietzschean heroes, he wants to have it all: “Pourquoi ne pas l’avoir toute?”(97). When the
peasants gather together for the All Saints Day celebration, Jean’s reading of a popular
propaganda story, Les Malheurs et le Triomphe de Jacques Bonhomme, does not inspire in
Buteau any spirit of solidarity for the French peasant’s misery, sufferings, and victory in
revolution. Rather it stimulates him to embark upon a personal revolution against others, a
solitary struggle for life and the land, and triggers passionate emotions of anger and pride:
Buteau s’était levé, et il marchait d’un bout à l’autre de l’étable, la face dure, d’un pas
inquiet et songeur. Il n’avait plus parlé depuis la lecture, comme possédé par ce que le
livre disait, ces histoires de la terre si rudement conquise. Pourquoi ne pas l’avoir
toute? Un partage lui devenait insupportable. Et c’étaient d’autres choses encore, des
choses confuses, qui se battaient dans son crâne épais, de la colère, de l’orgueil,
l’entêtement de ne pas revenir sur ce qu’il avait dit, le désir exaspéré du mâle voulant
et ne voulant pas, dans la crainte d’être dupé. (97)
The decadent aesthetics of transgression engenders powerful emotions. For a transgressive,
fatal man life has to be felt: pain and passion are elements of our existence, and sin is the
normal state of nature.20 Yet in terms of love, Buteau feels attachment and desire only for the
material world; his passion of possession evolves into a fetishized desire for the Mother
Earth. When Buteau finally accepts his part and marriage with Lise increases the fortune, he
wallows in the pleasure of possession:
Depuis qu’il avait accepté, c’était une grande passion satisfaite, la joie brutale de la
possession; et une chose la doublait, cette joie, l’idée que sa sœur et son frère étaient
volés, que son lot valait davantage, à présent que le nouveau chemin bordait sa pièce.
Il ne les rencontrait plus sans ricaner, en malin, disant avec des clins d’yeux:
– Tout de même, je les ai fichus dedans! (201)
A will to transgress and even a desire for decay distinguish decadent characters from
naturalist tragic victims; the decadent protagonists frequently reflect on their own state of
decadence, choosing transgression, pleasure and decay.21 The outspoken immorality – Buteau
18
On the representation of the primitive in Zola’s novel, see Riikka Rossi, “Transgression, Nostalgia, Order.
Representation of the Primitive in Émile Zola’s La Terre and Knut Hamsun’s Markens Grøde,” Nordlit 28
(2011): 257–70.
19
See Mario Praz, The Romantic Agony, tr. Angus Davidson (London and New York: Oxford University Press,
[1952] 1979) 55–83.
20
Praz 74, 148.
21
Lyytikäinen 246.
THE ALLURE OF DISGUST: RURAL DECADENCE IN ZOLA’S LA TERRE
shows neither remorse nor compassion for the sufferings of his family – accentuates the
impetus to contravene the laws of nature and culture, and suggests the decadent view of the
world as a voluntary choice. In this view, Buteau is no longer a mere victim of social and
biological conditions; his action cannot be explained only in terms of the inevitable forces of
hereditary degeneration.22 In the context of Les Rougon-Macquart, Buteau can be compared
to Nana, to the mythical femme fatale, whom Zola himself called le diable, a figure supposed
to represent l’état de vice23 and in whom the line between naturalism and decadence is, at
best, blurred. Like Buteau, Nana does not passively slide into destruction. Conscious of her
fatal beauty and irresistible attraction, she uses her body to transgress the social hierarchies,
causing pain to all who are close to her and bringing anarchist revenge on behalf of the
outcasts of her family.
The effects of disgust and horror triggered by Buteau are enhanced by the layers of
metaphors and tropes in La Terre’s narrative discourse. The novel builds up a metonymic
enchainment between Buteau and unclean animality. Buteau is frequently compared with
pigs: the narrative repeats the expression “cochonneries” when speaking of Buteau’s
misbehaviors and refers to him as the dark-featured “cochon.” When Buteau disappears in the
market place, he is soon found in the company of pigs; “[sur] le ventre du marchand de
cochons. Il venait d’avoir son petit cochon à vingt francs” (182). The horror stories told at the
All Saints Day gathering, including the tales of the “Cochon noir” and the monstrous bat with
the human face, “la bête d’Orléans,” provide allusive mises en abyme pointing to Buteau, and
remind us of the presence of nature’s fearful, destructive energies. An ethnocritic reading of
La Terre would connect Buteau with the folkloric motif of evil spirits inherent in nature and
the rural milieu: Zola’s narrative configures him as a demonic spirit suddenly and
unexpectedly appearing and disappearing, a spirit who keeps the others waiting and triggers
fear. “Il ne manque que Buteau… Jamais à l’heure, jamais comme les autres, ce bougre-là!”
(35), Old Fouan curses in the meeting with the notary. Françoise, afraid of Buteau’s advances
and harassment, is disturbed by uncomfortable memories of Buteau’s presence and feels him
haunting their house after Lise and Buteau have left it: “elle sentait bien que Buteau était
toujours présent” (394).
Melancholia and Oceanic Redemption
Buteau’s demonic transgressions and aggressive violations of human taboo form important
elements in Zola’s rural decadence, but La Terre also displays links with other kinds of finde-siècle styles and tones. Taboo, as Freud understood it, diverges in two contrary directions
at once: the dangerous and forbidden, on the one hand, and the sacred, on the other. 24 In line
with the oxymoronic “holy dread” that features the Freudian concept of taboo,25 La Terre’s
decadent terror expands to spiritual experiences of the sacred. The novel’s allure of disgust is
contrasted with beatific experiences of primordial nature; the onslaught of visual
representations of the landscape gives rise to melancholia, serenity, and even moments of the
sublime. These important aspects were mostly ignored in contemporary readings of La Terre,
22
Despite Buteau’s will of transgression, the novel however does not ignore the role of heredity. Old Fouan’s
brutality echoes in the son, Buteau, whose cruelty is partially explained by the hereditary taint: “[il] tenait de son
père le désir brutal, l’entêtement dans la possession, aggravés par l’avarice étroite de sa mère” (Zola, La Terre
35).
23
Cited in Roger Ripoll, Réalité et mythe chez Zola, vol. 1 (Lille, France: Atelier de reproduction des thèses, Université
de Lille 3, 1981) 96.
24
Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo. Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Lives of Savages and Neurotics,
authorized translation by James Strachey (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975) 18.
25
“Our collocation ‘holy dread’ would often coincide in meaning with ‘taboo,’” Freud states in Totem and
Taboo. Freud 18.
RIIKKA ROSSI
which merely addressed the novel’s provocative poetics of repulsion, “immondice,”
“répugnance,” and “ordures.”26
In particular, La Terre’s heightened effects of horror, as well as the Dionysian, savage
primitivity and chaotic vulgarity featured in the character Buteau, are contrasted and balanced
by the Apollonian clarity and sensitivity of Jean Macquart.27 Jean can be compared to Étienne
Lantier in Germinal:28 like Étienne, he is a newcomer, whose arrival in and departure from
the rural community frame the novel’s story-world and set the narrative drive in motion.
However, while Étienne becomes a respected member of the mining community and even
comes to lead the revolt, Jean remains more passive. His contemplation and immersive selfreflection becomes a catalyst for emotional paralysis and existential fatigue, mal du siècle,
melancholia and ennui.29 Jean, “cet étranger,” “paraissait en visite, n’osant toucher à rien”
(394) – to quote his wife Françoise – is reminiscent of melancholic male protagonists of
nineteenth-century literature and their sense of boredom and alienation echoing of the
philosophical currents of the age. The veteran of Solferino has been torn apart by the
ferocities of war and now lives in voluntary exile from the modern world. Jean arrives at
Beauce in the hope of finding some rest: “il songeait à sa campagne d’Italie, et un grand
besoin de repos l’engourdissait, l’envie de s’allonger et de s’oublier dans l’herbe” (107).
Nonetheless, his nostalgic search for the paradise lost turns into a travesty of the bucolic
idyll. Jean finds himself among savages who are capable of more brutal violence than he saw
during the war.30
Jean, the narrator’s delegate and the witness for the novel’s dreadful events, provides
an outstandingly visual perspective in La Terre. As a stranger, Jean sees the countryside
otherwise than the local peasants, sensing the peaceful melancholia of the plain: “ce que les
paysans ne voient pas, ne sentent pas, lui le voyait, le sentait, la grande paix triste de la
plaine, le souffle puissant de la terre, sous le soleil et sous la pluie” (427). Starting from the
opening lines of the novel, in which Jean ploughs the field, seeing the village ahead of him
and then turning toward the vast plain of the Beauce, La Terre’s landscapes are frequently
registered through Jean’s eyes. Moreover, the visual and sensory experiences represented and
produced through Jean’s view unveil the affective potential of “the melancholic Beauce,” to
which Huysmans referred in his letter to Zola. As discussed by Fredrick Jameson, the
opening scene of La Terre offers a tangible and rich deployment of affect, a bodily feeling
inspired by the visual, and creates a kind of cinematographic or three-dimensional
experience, thus rupturing the linearity of the narrative and producing a new kind of scenic
temporality, a scenic present.31 The novel’s affective investments and moments of visual
26
According to Anatole France, for instance, in La Terre Zola ignored both “the beauty of words and of things”:
“M. Zola ignore la beauté des mots comme il ignore la beauté des choses.” France (1887).
27
On the Apollonian and Dionysian dimension in literary decadence, see Pirjo Lyytikäinen, Narkissos ja sfinksi.
Minä ja toinen vuosisadanvaihteen kirjallisuudessa (Helsinki: SKS, 1997).
28
See also Gérard Gengembre, Préface to Émile Zola, La Terre (Paris: Pocket, 1999) 13.
29
Paul Bourget, among others, considered increasing self-reflection as a source of suffering and melancholia:
“Ce n’est que la réflexion individuelle qui amène plusieurs d’entre nous, et malgré l’optimisme héréditaire, à la
négation suprême.” Paul Bourget, Essais de psychologie contemporaine. Études litteraires (Paris: Gallimard
[1883]1993) 10.
30
“Dire qu’il était si joyeux, le jour où il avait quitté le service, après la guerre d’Italie, à l’idée de n’être plus un
traîneur de sabre, un tueur de monde! Et, depuis cette époque, il vivait dans de sales histoires, au milieu de
sauvages. Dès son mariage, il en avait eu gros sur le cœur; mais les voilà qui volaient, qui assassinaient,
maintenant! De vrais loups, lâchés au travers de la plaine, si grande, si calme! Non, non! c’était assez, ces bêtes
dévorantes lui gâtaient la campagne! Pourquoi en faire traquer un couple, la femelle et le mâle, lorsqu’on aurait
dû détruire la bande entière? Il préférait partir” (Zola, La Terre 492).
31
Fredrick Jameson, The Antinomies of Realism (London: Verso, 2013) 47-38. In his recent study, Jameson
considers Zola as the novelist who offers some of the richest deployments of affect in the nineteenth-century
realism. On Zola’s cinematographic and filmic potential, see Anna Gural-Migdal, L’Écrit-Écran des Rougon-
THE ALLURE OF DISGUST: RURAL DECADENCE IN ZOLA’S LA TERRE
immersion manifest Zola’s narrative striving towards a stylistic modernity, even producing
effects of estrangement. As Susan Harrow observes, in spite of Zola’s reputation as an author
of readable classic narratives in terms of Barthes, the Zolian texture resists the linearity of
realist narrative and anticipates a modernist aesthetic by producing a blurring of positions, a
merging of perspectives, forms of dissolution, ellipsis and abstraction.32
The complexity and transformative energy of Zola’s metaphors are illustrated also by
La Terre’s leitmotif, “the wheat field,” which is introduced through Jean’s perspective in the
opening scene of the novel. The oceanic images of the field, “cet océan de terre immobile”
(21) evolve into a dynamic and animistic agency, which embodies the primordial forces of
life and represents the mythical Mother Earth – the true heroine of the novel, as Zola
explained in his preparatory notes.33 While human life brings only in devastation, suffering
and nausea, the melancholic beauty of the white fields offers Jean a source of consolation.
Before leaving Rognes, Jean desires to bid farewell to his two loves: to visit Françoise’s
grave and to see the field, once again: “la plaine immense, la triste Beauce, qu’il avait fini par
aimer, dans ses longues heures solitaires de travail” (493); the quiet plain, immense and
soulless, also represents a projection of his own existential emptiness. Like the motif of the
sea in La Joie de vivre (1884), La Terre’s field accumulates metaphoric layers of meaning,
standing for collective consciousness and echoing Schopenhauerian imagery. Like the
ceaseless rolling of waves in La Joie de Vivre, the silent movement of the field simulates the
eternal pulse of the German philosopher’s Die Welt als Wille [the Will of the World]. The
panoramic views over the fields open up a spatial experience of the infinite, both at the
horizontal and the vertical level: the horizon which extends “à l’infini” in sight is expanded
upwards to the wide open sky, the “ciel vaste.” Through the cycle of seasons, La Terre
renders tangible not only erosion and decay but also the revitalizing power of nature and
victory over the morbidity of life: “C’était la poussée du printemps futur qui coulait avec
cette fermentation des purins; la matière décomposée retournait à la matrice commune, la
mort allait refaire de la vie” (397). It is in the field, in the lap of the white sea, that a peaceful
serenity, “une grande sérénité” falls and silences the chaotic battle of life.34 The consoling
experiences of landscapes offer redemptive moments of fragile beauty, and create a
regenerative mood in opposition to the novel’s decadent spirit of degeneration. The
enrichening of the soil thereby opens the way to a merging with the sources of primal life, a
feeling Romain Rolland later called the oceanic: the momentary dissolution of the sense of
self in the cosmos, a liberation from the boundaries of self, the burden of the modern world
or, in Schopenhauer’s terms, from the grip of the eternal Will.35
The oceanic sense of interdependence with the universe manifests itself also in the
impressionistic descriptions of the novel which efface the contours of reality, emanating
Macquart. Conceptions iconiques et filmiques du roman chez Zola (Villeneuve d’Ascq, France: Presses Universitaires du
Septentrion, 2013).
32
Susan Harrow, Zola. The Body Modern. Pressures and Prospects of Representation (London: Legenda, 2010)
61.
33
“La Terre. C’est l’héroïne de mon livre. La terre nourricière, la terre qui donne la vie, et qui la reprend,
impassible.” Cited in Gengembre, Préface to Émile Zola, La Terre 12.
34
“[…] à l’infini, bossuant cette mer blonde, les meules moutonnaient, paraissaient grandir démesurément,
flambantes d’un côté, déjà noires de l’autre, jetant des ombres qui s’allongeaient, jusqu’aux lointains perdus de
la plaine. Une grande sérénité tomba, il n’y eut plus, très haut, qu’un chant d’alouette. Personne ne parlait, parmi
les travailleurs harassés, qui suivaient avec une résignation de troupeau, la tête basse. Et l’on n’entendait qu’un
petit bruit de l’échelle, sous le balancement de la morte, rapportée dans le blé mûr” (Zola, La Terre 252).
35
Inspired by Eastern mysticism, Rolland coined the term in a letter to Sigmund Freud, who later elaborated it
in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930). Unlike Rolland, Freud saw the oceanic not as a momentary or transitory
ecstatic experience but as a potentially permanent regression and a first step towards the fearful return to the
inorganic that he called the death wish. See Marianna Torgovnick, Primitive Passions. Men, Women and the
Quest for Ecstasy (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996) 41.
RIIKKA ROSSI
prismatic effects of light and generating sensory experiences. Jean’s last visit to Françoise’s
grave – to the weed-choked, gothic, decadent cemetery – contrasts with the camera-eye
panorama of Beauce spreading out behind the graves. The reader is led to perceive Beauce’s
awakening to early spring: the pale shades of the sun and its silken beauty; the golden dust of
the germ and the vibration of light and sun – the promise of the future.36 This illuminated,
layered reality manifests the connections between primitive nature and spiritual emotions.
The novel’s decadent decay is contrasted with the vitality of nature, which even generates
experiences of religious ecstasy, as we note in the scene in which the Fouan household and
Jean view the blessed rain over the fields: “Et tous, en tas devant la fenêtre, épanouis, dans
une sorte d’extase religieuse, regardaient ruisseler la pluie tiède, sans fin, comme s’ils avaient
vu, sous cette eau bienfaisante, pousser les grands blés verts” (210). Despite the devastation,
life goes on. In line with the cyclic vision of Les Rougon-Macquart, the novel’s end suggests
a revival of a new era after the violent struggle for life, when Jean Macquart leaves the
village and the ruins of his existence there: “Il partait, lorsque, une dernière fois, il promena
ses regards des deux fosses, vierges d’herbe, aux labours sans fin de la Beauce, que les
semeurs emplissaient de leur geste continu. Des morts, des semences, et le pain poussait de la
terre” (509).37
Negative Emotions: Shock Effects and Critical Potential
The changing facets of La Terre’s male protagonists exemplify the ambivalent affective
atmosphere of Zola’s novel, which oscillates between naturalist scenes of disgust, violence
and ugliness; the poetic sensuality of melancholic landscapes and redemptive experiences of
the oceanic and the sublime. The novel illustrates Zola’s polymorphous use of varied stylistic
registers38 and generates a story-world which has no stable generic identity, thus manifesting
and anticipating the disruptive aesthetics of stylistic modernism. In general, the oxymoronic
crisscrossing of styles and themes is characteristic of the Zolian texture, which frequently
captures contrasting representations of beauty and horror, power and collapse, energy and
implosion.39
The decadent exaggeration of the peasants’ bestiality in La Terre, which attracted
abundant moral indignation at the time of the novel’s release, even achieves parodic,
grotesque, Rabelaisian dimensions, manifested in the buffoonish figure of Jésus-Christ in
particular.40 The carnival-like aspects fuel the novel’s transgressive energy, striving for the
reorganisation of social hierarchies and pointing to the birth of a new society; La Terre,
which constantly refers to the revolution of 1789, urges a negation of existing norms and
36
“Un pâle soleil de mars blanchissait le ciel, voilé de vapeurs, d’une finesse de soie blanche, à peine avivée
d’une pointe de bleu; et, sous cette lumière douce, la Beauce, engourdie des froids de l’hiver, semblait s’attarder
au sommeil, comme ces dormeuses qui ne dorment plus tout à fait, mais qui évitent de remuer, pour jouir de leur
paresse. Les lointains se noyaient, la plaine en semblait élargie, étalant les carrés déjà verts des blés, des avoines
et des seigles d’automne; tandis que, dans les labours restés nus, on avait commencé les semailles de printemps.
Partout, au milieu des mottes grasses, des hommes marchaient, avec le geste, l’envolée continue de la semence.
On la voyait nettement, dorée, ainsi qu’une poussière vivante, s’échapper du poing des semeurs les plus proches.
Puis, les semeurs se rapetissaient, se perdaient à l’infini, et elle les enveloppait d’une onde, elle ne semblait être,
tout au loin, que la vibration même de la lumière. À des lieues, aux quatre points de l’étendue sans borne, la vie
de l’été futur pleuvait dans le soleil” (Zola, La Terre 493).
37
The ending of La Terre is reminiscent of the final paragraphs of Germinal and its promise for the future. At
the same time, in La Terre, the revival of life is shadowed by the imminent Franco-Prussian war and its coming
devastation.
38
On multi-stylistic aspects in Les Rougon-Macquart, see Harrow 61.
39
Harrow 48.
40
See Baguley 98.
THE ALLURE OF DISGUST: RURAL DECADENCE IN ZOLA’S LA TERRE
values and calls for revolt. Yet despite the novel’s generically parodic aspects, La Terre’s
carnival remains bitter.41 Towards the end, the novel’s emotional register becomes
increasingly sullied. Buteau’s joy of transgression turns into the bitterness, greed, and envy,
which trigger the flood of cruelty and violence. When the marriage of Jean and Françoise
compels Buteau and Lise to give up a part of their heritage, Buteau flies into a passionate
fury and anger – “sa colère touchait à l’extravagance” (389) – leading up to Françoise’s rape
and Old Fouan’s murder. A welling up of hate and spite despise take overcomes Lise as well,
whose disgust for Françoise annihilates the vestiges of affection between the sisters. Old
Fouan, abandoned and chased away by his own children, feels ashamed and distressed. The
marriage of Jean and Françoise, a marriage “sans plaisir” is filled with sadness and anxiety.
Regardless of the moments of sublime spirituality, also Jean’s emotional experiences turn
into the realm of unprestigious feelings. The series of scandalous events in Rognes, including
Françoise’s brutal murder and the death of their unborn baby, induces in Jean affects of
anxiety and disgust; a wave of anger flows over him, which can only be unblocked by leaving
the village community: “La souffrance, le dégoût des dix années passées à Rognes, lui
remontaient de la poitrine en un flot de colère”; for this reason, “Il préférait partir” (492).
Jean is happy to switch from the battle of life to the fields of war; he is prepared to defend
“La vieille terre de France” in the imminent war with Prussia, launching the story to be
continued in La Débâcle (1892).
The poetics of negative emotions in La Terre augments an epistemological
uncertainty about the ethics of storytelling in a novel which infringes on some fundamental
taboos of human life, while creating aestheticized moments of beauty and the thrill of
reading. The macabre attraction of disgust peculiar to La Terre’s decadent vision carries both
positive and negative dimensions. On one hand, disgust is humanizing, both natural and
human; we experience disgust as particularly and categorically real, since it usually relates to
concrete and organic things and is accompanied by sharp physiological coloring.42 In this
view, naturalism’s notorious poetics of disgust pertains to the ways in which naturalist
literature channels our attention to the harsh realities represented, enhancing its effects of
reality through rejection’s powerful emotional charge. Moreover, as a strong, intense
sensation, disgust disrupts the gloomy boredom of the banal everyday, and the great
emotional amplitude may in itself be conducive to pleasure – to the allure of disgust.43 At the
same time, since disgust evaluates negatively whatever it touches, it proclaims the inferiority
of its object; the type of disgust triggered by human beings involves a clear amoral
dimension, which has throughout history been used to exclude people embodying the
dominant group’s fears.44 Contemporary perspectives on La Terre reflect this very complex
repulsion: the reader experiences amplified emotions and waves of shock, when exposed to
the novel’s disgusting effects of reality, feeling simultaneously attraction and pleasure,
notably recorded by Huysmans, who gorges himself on Zolian decadence; but the reader also
senses moral indignation at the dehumanizing representation of peasants.45
41
With the expression “bitter carnival,” I refer to Michel André Bernstein’s interpretation of the dark sides of
satire and carnival in modern literature. See Michel André Bernstein, Bitter Carnival. Ressentiment and the
Abject Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).
42
See Ian William Miller, Anatomy of Disgust (Harvard: Harvard University Press 1997) 11; Winfried
Menninghaus Disgust.The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, tr. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany,
US: State University of New York Press, 2003) 17.
43
Menninghaus 8.
44
On the moral aspects of disgust, see Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the
Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006) 14.
45
In his review, Anatole France cites Louis Ulbach, who considered Zola’s peasant representation as an
unpatriotic denial of France.
RIIKKA ROSSI
The negative emotions represented in and triggered by La Terre, appear however not
merely as unpleasant and degenerative feelings, but carry a cathartic and positive potential
which tends even towards renewal and restoration. “L’étude sincère purifie tout, comme le
feu,” as Zola explained in the preface to Thérèse Raquin.46 In general, the naturalist
representation and evocation of negative emotions seems to contribute to the Zolian/realist
commitment to the unveiling and debating of social ills, and of the problems of modernity.
For instance, since Aristotle’s time, anger has been seen as a moral emotion, a necessary
response to social injustice. Even ugly and amoral feelings can be valuable in recognizing
and polemically responding to social inequalities or even in providing transgressive
experiences of identity formation.47 Given this picture, the “scatological” aspect of
naturalism, the “littérature ordurière,” can be seen in a new light. While La Terre’s passionate
envy and greed may be ugly, they render visible certain conflicts and complexities of
modernity and societal conditions which nurture the vicious cycle of decadent passions and
violence.48 In La Terre, the free markets of capitalist society and global commerce generate
aggressive price competition, which has driven traditional agriculture into crisis, compelling
the peasants to become avaricious. “C’est toujours pour le blé qu’on se révolte et qu’on se
tue… ” Lequeu, the schoolmaster, encapsulates the darkening situation (464). In the midnineteenth-century spirit of anarchism and revolution, La Terre is not devoid of socialist
allusions. In some respect, La Terre illustrates how modern capitalism extends the practice of
“primitive accumulation,” following Marx, driving the peasants away from the soil, self, and
nature. Rural fictions often reflect primordial desires for a self born of the soil, born from the
earth itself, the need for what the Greeks called autochthony.49 La Terre’s decadent
transgressions against fundamental taboos and family values violate and negate innate,
natural laws of love and affection; but in the end, the envious drama of “le partage de la
terre” also reveals violent needs of belonging and claims of the right to exist.
46
Zola, Thérèse Raquin 11.
On the critical potential of negative emotions, see Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, US: The University of
Chicago Press, 2005).
48
Envy is often moralized and considered as an ugly, egocentric passive condition; but as Sianne Ngai has
reminded us, it is the only agonistic emotion to take perceived inequality as its object. See Ngai 128.
49
On the concept of autochthony, see Peter Geschiere, The Perils of Belonging. Autochthony, Citizenship and
Exclusion in Africa and in Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
47